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Revision as of 18:17, 16 December 2005 by Lion55 (talk | contribs) (→External link)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Legal realism is a family of theories about the nature of law developed in the first half of the 20th century in the United States (American Legal Realism) and Scandinavia (Scandinavian Legal Realism). It has become quite common today to identify Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as the main precursor of American Legal Realism (other influences include Roscoe Pound, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, and Wesley Hohfeld). The chief inspiration for Scandinavian Legal Realism many consider to be the works of Axel Hagerstrom.
The most famous representatives of American Legal Realism were Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, Robert Lee Hale, Felix Cohen, Thurman Arnold, Hessel Yntema, Max Radin, and Leon Green. The most famous representatives of Scandinavian Legal Realism were Alf Ross and Karl Olivecrona. No single set of beliefs was shared by all legal realists, but many of the realists shared one or more of the following ideas:
- Belief in the indeterminacy of law. Many of the legal realists believed that the law in the books (statutes, cases, etc.) did not determine the results of legal disputes. Jerome Frank is famously credited with the idea that a judicial decision might be determined by what the judge had for breakfast.
- Belief in the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to law. Many of the realists were interested in sociological and anthropolical approaches to the study of law. Karl Llewellyn's book The Cheyenne Way is a famous example of this tendency.
- Belief in legal instrumentalism, the view that the law should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to balance competing societal interests.
The heyday of the legal realist movement came in the 1920s and the 1930s. Following the end of World War II, as its leading figures retired or became less active, legal realism gradually started to fade. Many schools of legal thought today claim to derive their ideas from legal realism, including critical legal studies (chief representatives include Duncan Kennedy and Roberto Unger) and law and economics (chief representatives include Richard Posner and Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago).
External link
- Brian Leiter, American Legal Realism, in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (W. Edmundson & M. Golding, eds., 2003)
- Michael Steven Green, Legal Realism as Theory of Law, 46 William & Mary Law Review 1915 (2005)